“If a student is exposed, even at the EPA’s action level of 4 picocuries per liter, that’s equivalent to smoking half a pack of cigarettes per day.”(1)
In March of 2012, USA Today published a great article about radon in schools.(2) The author, Jeff Rossen, found some astonishing facts:
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“Most schools in the U.S. don’t test for radon. With more than 70,000 classrooms at risk across the country, just five states — Rhode Island, Connecticut, Virginia, Florida and Colorado — require radon testing.”
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Efforts to identify high-risk schools meet resistance: NBC News reached out to 40 different school districts across the country to offer free radon testing; all 40 either declined or didn’t respond. Rossen says that one Indianapolis district said, “This can only make us look bad. If the levels are high, parents will get upset and want every school tested.”
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Harmful levels of radioactive radon gas — which is invisible, odorless and tasteless — exists in many classrooms across the country. And many of these reach levels nearly twice the Environmental Protection Agency’s acceptable limit. “If a student is exposed, even at the EPA’s action level of 4 picocuries per liter, that’s equivalent to smoking half a pack of cigarettes per day,” radon expert Bill Field told Rossen. (Note: a picocurie is a trillionth of a curie, which is a unit of radioactivity.)